The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

glFX and Composition Working Groups

Open call for participation to define visual effects framework and window system APIs for advanced user interfaces and window systems

7th March, 2007 - GDC, San Francisco, CA - The Khronos™ Group announced today it is issuing calls for participation in two newly formed new working groups. The glFX™ Working Group is defining a run-time API to enable advanced 3D visual effects contained in a COLLADA™ FX file to be easily and portably used in OpenGL® and OpenGL ES applications. The Composition Working Group is defining graphics APIs to enable window systems to be constructed using open standards for display composition to encourage mobile devices to use fully accelerated advanced user interfaces. Additionally, Khronos is delighted to announce that Ardites, AZTEQ mobile, DaimlerChrysler, Coding Technologies, Marvell, Matrox, McubeWorks, Micron, NDS, NXP, Omegame, PineOne Communications, Tungsten and Vodafone have joined over one hundred existing members to define open standards for the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on platforms ranging from embedded systems such as mobile phones to high-performance desktop and workstation systems. All Khronos members are able to join any working group to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications - further details are at www.khronos.org/members.

Today Khronos also announced a COLLADA contest to encourage open source COLLADA conditioning programs to be created and uploaded into the COLLADA Framework on Sourceforge. A growing body of conditioners enables any developer to construct sophisticated pipelines to condition content for diverse platforms. Winners of the COLLADA Contest will be announced at SIGGRAPH 2007 and prizes include airfare to San Diego and four night’s accommodation to attend SIGGRAPH and a SONY Playstation 3. Further details are at www.ColladaContest.com.

The Collada Contest marks the beginning of a number of Khronos online community initiatives to enable and foster worldwide adoption of Khronos standards, including the availability of a Japanese Khronos site at www.khronos.jp Khronos will run regular contests and competitions driven by Khronos working groups including an upcoming OpenKODE Contest.

“We welcome all our new members as their expertise and market presence helps to continue evolve Khronos to genuinely meet industry needs. This evolution is perfectly illustrated by the new Composition and glFX Working Groups which are addressing two of the hottest areas in mobile graphics - advanced user interfaces and new generation programmable 3D graphics,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “The glFX Working Group also shows the benefit of a broad membership as it combines expertise from the OpenGL, OpenGL ES and COLLADA communities for the benefit of all. A standardized effects framework for OpenGL and OpenGL ES is a welcome development and NVIDIA is pleased to make its CgFX run-time API available as a design input to the Working Group to minimize fragmentation and accelerate timescales.”

“AZTEQ mobile is pleased to join Khronos to help accelerate the development and adoption of OpenKODE in the wireless industry. AZTEQ is focused on enabling compelling 3D content on mobile devices and bringing a rich gaming experience to end users,” said Quaeed Motiwala, vice president of marketing at AZTEQ mobile. “OpenKODE aims to reduce the porting costs of application software and promote content reuse, making the efforts of Khronos and AZTEQ synergistic. We are delighted to be part of the industry-leading Khronos ecosystem.”

“Joining the Khronos Group is a key step in the development of Omegame,” said Sébastien Kohn, sales and marketing director for Omegame. “Participating in the definition of the new standards that will rule tomorrow’s digital life will strengthen the technological advance of Menus Master, Omegame’s complete user interface (UI) authoring toolchain. Moreover, Omegame is also very proud of being the first French company to join the Khronos Group.”

About the glFX Working Group
An effects framework is critical in the age of programmable graphics as an essential link between DCC tools that create visual effects and applications that need to apply these effects to models and scenes. The glFX specification will create an open standard runtime API for OpenGL and OpenGL ES applications to manipulate and use effects described in the existing COLLADA FX format. The glFX Working Group will also provide documentation, example and utility code, and other infrastructure to enable a complete workflow from content creation through to application rendering.

About the Composition Working Group
The new Composition Working Group is defining APIs to enable window systems to be constructed using open standards for display composition potentially using techniques such as multi-tasking, 2D and 3D transitions and alpha-blending based composition. These APIs will enable hardware accelerated display composition using a subset of existing OpenGL ES and OpenVG functionality. The working group will not define application level APIs but will ensure that windowed applications will be enable to efficiently use OpenKODE™ for accessing media acceleration and interacting with the window system.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More Information at www.khronos.org.

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